Tag Archives: Satan

Satan Disguises Himself

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Medieval Byzantine-style mosaic depicts Satan tempting Christ in the desert: “If you are the Son of God, make these stones into bread.” Christ answers: “Man does not live by bread alone.”


For such people are false prophets, deceitful workers who are disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. It is no great surprise, then, if his servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness; for their end will be according to their works. (2 Cor. 11:13-15)

St. Paul warns the Corinthians that his enemies, who call themselves the super-apostles, are liars and deceivers who are not true apostles at all. They are servants of Satan, pretending to be something they are not just as Satan himself can pretend to be something he is not.

Evil apes respectability and weeds do their best to look like wheat. But whatever similarity they have to wheat is betrayed by what they taste like …. We therefore need the grace of God, a sober mind and watchful eyes, so that we do not eat weeds instead of wheat and make ourselves sick; nor to mistake the wolf for a sheep and be attacked; and not to mistake the death-dealing devil for a good angel and be devoured.

St. Curil of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.1

Satan began as an angel of light. He was, in fact, the brightest of the angels. But he rebelled against God and became the enemy, the deceiver, the liar, and the pretender. Based on hints in the Old and New Testament, we think that about 1/3 of the angels joined his rebellion. Some early theologians thought that humans were created to replace the fallen angels in the Kingdom of God. But others say that Satan and his followers rebelled because they were jealous of the love and attention that the Holy Trinity gave to the human race.

Theologians who specialize in angels tell us that once an angel has chosen to be faithful to God or not, that angel cannot change their mind. That’s why we can trust our guardian angels to not suddenly “switch sides” and lead us away from God once we have begun to trust them and their guidance. We can hope that the fallen angels will be able to repent but we can’t depend on it.

In fact, it’s our ability to repent that makes us superior to the angels. We can repent because we have bodies and are not simply pure intellects as the angels are. But we must still guard ourselves. We can deceive and lie to ourselves, if not other people. We can think we are devout lovers of God but if we claim to love God but hate or ignore our fellow human beings, we do not actually love God.

The super-apostles in Corinth deceived themselves even more than they deceived their fellow Corinthians. Satan deceives himself more than he deceives any of us. Self-deception, in Russian called prelest, is the most dangerous trap we can fall into. That’s why frequent, thorough self-examination against objective standards is so important. There are many “Guides to self-examination” available, often based on the Ten Commandments or the eight Beatitudes or the Seven Virtues. The important thing is to use them and keep checking ourselves against them and admitting–going to Confession–when we have failed to live up to them.

Rather than lie to ourselves, we can embrace and walk in the light with the angels.

You Forgive=I Forgive=Cheat the Cheater

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The wonderworking physicians Panteleimon (left) with Cosmos and Damian (right) show the doctors offering their patients medicine on a spoon that looks very similar to a priest offering Holy Communion with a spoon (as in the Orthodox Church). The priest offers healing as a spiritual physician. Physicians offer healing–in Greek, the same word as “salvation”–and the miracles of physical healing-salvation in the Gospel are always about healing-salvation on an even more fundamental level in our lives.


Therefore, I beg you to confirm your love for him. For the reason I have written to you is to test you and to know whether you are obedient in everything. The person you forgive, I also forgive. For indeed, what I have forgiven–if I have anything to forgive–I have done for your sake in the presence of Christ, lest we be cheated by Satan; for we are not unaware of his schemes. (2 Cor. 2:8-11)

St. Paul is writing about someone who committed a very serious sin in public and whom the Corinthian parish excommunicated, at his request. (Perhaps it was the man sleeping with his father’s wife.) Now St. Paul is asking the parish to forgive the person. He says that he is testing their obedience, to see if they will forgive at his request as they excommunicated the person at his request. He also promises that if the parish forgives the person, he will also forgive the person. If anyone refuses to forgive, they are being cheated by Satan, the great adversary, whose schemes and plots against the People of God are well known.

The important thing, St. Paul says, is that the parish forgive the sinner. If the parish forgives, then the apostle also forgives. It is the forgiveness of the parish–the entire Church–that cheats Satan of his prey. Forgiveness is always a community event: to be forgiven by one is to be forgiven by all and to be forgiven by all is to be forgiven by one. Forgiveness is never solitary or isolated, done in a corner and unknown.

Confession of sin and forgiveness is always a community act. Although we each confess personally in private to the priest, the priest personifies both Christ and the Church–the Head and the Body together. The priest offers each sinner the forgiveness of both Christ and the Church–the Head and the Body together. If I receive this forgiveness, I cheat Satan of his prey (me); if the priest offers forgiveness on my behalf, we cheat Satan of his prey (the community of the faithful).

Our confession is not about how we sin by “breaking the rules.” Our confession is about telling the spiritual physician–the priest–our symptoms, how the disease of sin afflicts us. The physician doesn’t tell us what we need to do to pay off our punishment for breaking the rules; the priest offers us a prescription of spiritual medicine for how we can recover from the symptoms we have described.

If we ask for-accept-extend forgiveness, we have cheated Satan of his prey. At least for today. Satan deserves to be cheated of his prey because he only snatches his prey because he first cheated us, the human race, by lying and cheating Adam and Eve, our first parents. The cheater is cheated and the world is saved.

Satan Bound for 1,000 Years

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Satan chained and bound by the angel (Beatus Apocalypse illumination). Medieval illuminations often depict Satan as an African Muslim, similar to the Moors who invaded Spain; the Moors personify the Enemy, the Other.

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent who is Devil and the Satan, and bound him for a thousand years…. When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be let loose from his prison. (Apocalypse 20:1-2, 7)

Satan is bound in prison for 1,000 years. This period of 1,000 years is taken by most early interpreters to mean the entire period of human history from the Crucifixion to the Last Days. Satan is bound in chains by Christ but not totally incapacitated–his minions still tempt and harass the human race. St. John describes each Christian’s victory over Satan, usually by martyrdom, as the “first resurrection;” the “second resurrection” is the General Resurrection of all the dead on Judgement Day.

Satan is loosed at the end of human history not so that he can unleash his anger any more against the human race; he is loosed so that he can be finally and definitively be cast down. Many early preachers used the image of a chicken or a snake beheaded to describe Satan: slain by Christ on the Cross, yet still able to make a mess and scare humans by spewing blood from the fatal wound but seeming to still be alive, running around–“like a chicken with its head cut off!”–or wriggling about.

Satan is often described or painted as having dark or black skin; often, a devil is described as looking like “an Ethiopian” by early Christian monks. Having black skin is not necessarily a dishonor in the Old Testament; the bride in the Song of Songs is “dark and beautiful.” Neither is appearing dark always associated with evil by other cultures: Clare Rothschild points out that “the Nile received its name from the Greek word νεῖλος (‘valley’). Since the river deposits black sediment after it floods, the Egyptians called the river ‘Ar’ (‘black’)…. Black is used of Egyptian gods and goddesses as an honorific: kmwr = ‘Great Black One’ for Osiris and km as epithet used with the name of the god (e.g. Hathor, Apis, Min, Thoth, etc.) or kmt, goddess (e.g. Isis)….” But the “counter-divine” is described as black by Sophocles.

Rothschild suggests that the devils and Satan were associated with Ethiopia because Ethiopia was outside Roman-Byzantine imperial control and was therefore associated with lawlessness. Several church fathers use the illustration that all humans were once Ethiopians (lawless) but have now been brought from lawlessness to righteousness by Christ. Pamela Patton suggests that medieval Spanish interpretations of the Apocalypse–such as the Beatus Apocalypse illumination above–align Satan and Ethiopians as a way to equate Satan with the Moors who invaded the Iberian peninsula and personified the Other, the Enemy.

Rothschild points out many fascinating associations with the color black that might also have influenced the depiction of Satan.